“I was oblivious to any ‘perfect parenting’ zeitgeist”

I’M WATCHING Escape to the Country, a TV programme in which a couple in their early thirties is looking at different houses with a view to buying one and living in it.

The woman is pregnant for the first time and feels that one house in particular “doesn’t offer the correct architectural configuration for family life”.

“Come again?” I think.

“Yes,” the woman says to camera, “although the aesthetics are pleasing and several of the most important design concepts have been rigorously observed, the architectural configuration lets it down.” “Whaaaat?” I say.

Her husband is nodding, in assent with everything his wife says. I’m not convinced he understands why; he looks a bit glazed, as if his thoughts are on other matters, like where the flat screen/table football are going to go, perhaps.

My husband is watching too. “What an eejit,” he says.

This couple is getting on my nerves. Nothing wrong with planning a baby, I think, but I have a hunch that this is the kind of woman who plans everything else, the sort that is careful to do everything the right way round.

My mind flashes back to when we had our first, unplanned baby. There were some nice things about doing things the wrong way round, about being very young and clueless, without any idea about what architectural configuration might mean.

“She needs to spend a couple of nights in our first flat,” my husband says.

I think of the student let, to which we brought our newborn home, smack opposite a sex shop in Clapham. We used to hang out of the window at night and watch fetishists going in and out of Ultimate Leather, lit orange by the glow of sodium street-lights. Behind us, our baby would sleep, swaddled in a soft nest of hand-knitted blankets, oblivious to anything other than his safe, milky world of comfort and warmth.

The woman on the TV says they’re keen to give their baby the right start.

Christ, I think, architectural configuration and design concepts as birthrights. I think back to our baby’s wrong start; the grim flat and both of his parents in their final year of college.

There was no ready-made baby world waiting for our son; no nursery painted in the muted hues of good taste, no expensive gleam of granite in the kitchen. Instead he was born into a student world; a raw, green world of flux and youth.

We’d take him up other grubby stairwells to other student flats where our friends would play a kind of gentle pass the parcel with him while they made toast and hung out, asking questions like, when’s he gonna walk? And I was surprised, sometimes, by their occasional flashes of instinct. Once, after the baby had spent hours fussing at my breast, a 19-year-old lad said “give him to me a sec” and I watched while he soothed him to sleep, swinging him backwards and forwards in a hammock fashioned out of an old bed sheet. Life was untidy and difficult, but in the middle of it all, right at the centre, we ring-fenced a quiet and steady space for babyhood that our friends seemed to understand.

The TV couple are talking about their dreams and plans for a perfect house, perfect baby… perfect bloody life, I think, irritated.

One good thing about having little time to dream or plan was that I was oblivious to any ‘perfect parenting’ zeitgeist that might have prevailed at the time.

The woman on TV tosses up the three different houses and tries to come to a decision as to which one she’ll buy. It’s an embarrassment of riches she has in front of her, a lucky dip of houses but she doesn’t look as if she knows it.

The flat was a transient stop for my baby. We moved on, lived in houses with more solid material comforts and after a while, escaped to the country.

But there was something about that flat.

Perhaps it was the smell of flowers, the flowers left unsold at the end of the day that my husband brought home from a florists, where he had a part-time job. I’d hand him the baby when he arrived at the door and put the flowers in jars; pale yellow freesias with a faint peppery scent, tulips and over-blown lilies.

Whatever it was, there was something about that dingy flat in Clapham, a rough-edged romance, which had nothing to do with correct architectural configuration.